I was rather taken aback, because it raised some tricky theological and metaphysical questions.

He puts these large metaphysical questions aside, devoting his efforts instead to understanding and evaluating the grounds on which to choose one position over another.

These seemingly metaphysical questions are today, in these ways, slowly being converted to the stuff of the physical sciences.

The sheer usefulness of this has inspired much metaphysical speculation on ears.

She starts to reach for more nonrational explanations, lamenting 'the poverty of metaphysical speculation in our time'.

Ordinary language philosophers tended to be equally suspicious, diagnosing metaphysical speculation as the pathological result of using words outside the down-to-earth contexts that gave them meaning.

His account of this 'new pleasure' (if less confessional than in his travel notebook) memorably weaves physical sensation and metaphysical speculation to the whiffs of a cigarette under the stars.

Social science was influenced by positivism, focusing on knowledge based on actual positive sense experience and avoiding the negative; metaphysical speculation was avoided.